Fox Host Wonders ‘What’s The Motivation’ To Stay Healthy If Poor People Have Low-Cost Health Care

Media Matters caught Scott revealing his animosity during a discussion on Trump’s sabotage of the Affordable Care Act last week:

SCOTT: But what’s the motivation—if these are the poorest Americans who are getting their co-pays and things like that covered, what’s the motivation for them to try to live a healthier lifestyle? If it doesn’t cost them anything to go to the doctor, what’s the motivation?

Let’s break down all the hideousness of Scott’s remarks:

He suggests that poor people are just mooching off the medical system;

He suggests that poor people are or will cause other people’s premiums to go up because they have no interest in staying healthy for its own sake;

He suggests that poor people don’t really deserve medical care. If they can’t pay for it or go bankrupt paying for it, well, too bad. It’s their own fault.

Scott should be ashamed of himself.

Watch a Fox News host display his disgust for his fellow Americans, below, from the October 16, 2017 Happening Now, via Media Matters.

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There’s a bit more going on here that should be unpacked, but the Right Wing perspective is very clear.

Yes, the point of Jon Scott’s Cavuto Mark was to use the premise that the ACA was a ridiculous handout to people who don’t deserve it. It’s the same premise that says we shouldn’t have Social Security or Medicare or anything like that. If you don’t have enough money to support yourself, that’s your problem and you should get a second or a third job. If you have a medical condition that makes this difficult, that’s your problem. If you’re having problems because the economy is in a tailspin, that’s your problem. In short, if you’re in the midst of any hardship, that’s your problem and the Right Wing wants you to figure it out on your own.

There’s also a nonsensical part of the Cavuto Mark – in that it assumes that a lower income person would rather be sick and get to use Medicaid than get a job. This is a common Right Wing meme – that the lower income person would rather live on assistance than support themselves. (We hear it in a variety of ways, particularly when Right Wingers scoff at the people who are on the low end of the wage scale, who blip in and out of Medicaid coverage. The working mom with a couple of kids who has Medicaid coverage will regularly face this problem as she works more – because she will earn just enough to disqualify her from benefits but not enough to be able to pay for any other coverage. The Right Wing reaction is always to paint that woman as a sloth living on Welfare. Or in worse cases, we get Reagan inventions like the Welfare Queen. But this is the core of the ACA coverage – it helps those people in this situation so they can actually get into a work situation and not worry that they just lost their coverage.)

But there’s a further bit of fun here, where Kristen Anderson is following Scott’s Cavuto Mark to say, hey, the lower income people want a decent quality of home life (note that there’s no mention of anyone trying to be healthy enough to go to work), but slashing this subsidy will allow the lower income person to “have a stake in the game” – as though they didn’t have one before.

Anderson is also positing the false premise that this is just a legal matter because these subsidies weren’t approved by Congress. This is another common Right Wing meme, and it ignores that there are many areas of funding that the executive branch does which are not expressly funded by Congress – having this discussion now just means that we will be in for further paralysis when every single program can now be challenged on this basis alone, which is likely what the Right Wing would like to see happen. Since that will prove their thesis that the government can’t accomplish anything. Also, Anderson is deliberately ignoring that the Congress actually refused to take any of these steps in their efforts to destroy the law and attack a President they hated. So President Obama trying to be a responsible manager is now presented as a threat to the Constitution and an irresponsible fool, while GOP haters and obstructionists are presented as tireless workers on behalf of the American People.

I also note that this segment concludes (past the point included here by Media Matters) with Jon Scott trying to portray the ACA as an invented “mess” and dismissing Richard Fowler’s attempt to discuss bipartisan efforts (that Pence and Trump are smugly ignoring) by saying that it will all be better once the insurance is sold across state lines. Something that we already know does not work and is fraught with corruption. (Similar to the Right Wing’s constant harping about e-Verify without admitting how flawed that system is…)